George Santayana had irrational faith in reason - I have irrational faith in TV.

Friday, December 2, 2011

Terra Nova as Good Biological Science Fiction

As Terra Nova chugs along to its season conclusion - perhaps series conclusion as well - it seems like a good time to assess what went wrong and right with the show.

Time travel is the central foundation of the series - people traveling from the future back to the prehistoric past. But as a continuing time travel story, replete with the paradoxes of time travel - if I travel to the past to make my current world better, and I make the change in the past which does make my current world better, then why in my better current world, where I was growing up, would I have wanted to travel back to the past in the first place - Terra Nova offered little. That general scenario was never Terra Nova's - the travel to the past is just to find a better life - but Terra Nova so far has not picked up on any other paradoxes, which are like fruit for the picking in time travel stories.

Dinosaurs ala Jurrasic Park are also an obvious mainstay of the series, and Terra Nova did pretty well on that score, though no great shakes. The smaller screens of even today's big screen television sets are just no match for dinosaurs on the big movie screen, and dinosaurs do even worse on iPads.

But one area in which Terra Nova has excelled is in its thoughtful treatment of the natural world in the past - not just special effected dinosaurs - or what is otherwise known as biological science fiction. A recent episode featured big insects outfitted with spy devices, an earlier episode had memories lost because of micro-organisms, and with Elisabeth's high tech medical knowledge playing a role in just about every show, the organic has really flourished in this series.

I admit to having a soft spot for biological science fiction - three of my novels pictured below delved into these themes (The Consciousness Plague about the loss of memory, and The Pixel Eye about squirrels outfitted with spying chips). And I indicated in a piece on the History Channel about the evolution of science fiction a few years ago that I expected biological science fiction to be the next wave (replacing physics as the leading science-fiction science).

If Terra Nova does get a chance to continue - which I hope it does - it would do well to more prominetly mine this rich vein of stories.

About Me

Paul Levinson, PhD, is Professor of Communication &
Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City.His 8 nonfiction books, including The Soft Edge (1997),
Digital McLuhan (1999), Realspace (2003), Cellphone (2004), and New New Media (2009, 2nd edition 2012), have been the
subject of major articles in the New York Times, Wired, the Christian Science
Monitor, and have been translated into 12 languages. His science fiction novels include The Silk Code (1999, ebook 2012), Borrowed Tides (2001), TheConsciousness Plague (2002, 2013), The Pixel Eye (2003), The Plot To SaveSocrates (2006, ebook 2012), and Unburning Alexandria (2013).His short stories
have been nominated for Nebula, Hugo, Edgar, and Sturgeon Awards.Paul Levinson appears on "The
O'Reilly Factor" (Fox News), "The CBS Evening News,"“NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” (PBS),“Nightline” (ABC), NPR, and numerous
national and international TV and radio programs. His 1972 album, Twice Upon a Rhyme, was re-issued in 2009 (CD) and 2010 (remastered vinyl). He reviews the best of
television in his InfiniteRegress.tv blog, and was listed in The Chronicle of
Higher Education’s “Top 10 Academic Twitterers” in 2009.

e-mail received from a reader:Dear Paul, I just dreamed of airships flying between raindrops. I just returned from 2042 CE, where I sold my hardcover copy of The Plot to Save Socrates for seventy million Neo-Euros, because it had your response to this e-mail from way back in 2007 scotch-taped onto the inside of the cover. A Paul Levinson collector paid top Neo-Euro, because of the authentic archaic e-mail printout from you. It turns out that not many of your e-mails from before your tenure as CEO of HBO/Cinemax and terms as United Nations Secretary General will survive that far into the future. So, please respond to this e-mail, to help found my great-grandchildren's fortune. My Will will stipulate that they must share with your great grandchidren. Thanks! Tom